Anti-icing performance of superhydrophobic surface fabricated by femtosecond laser composited dual-layers coating

Superhydrophobic surfaces have shown great potential anti-icing applications because of their low energy input, light weight and simple structure, which attract considerable attentions of researchers. The mechanical stability and chemical durability are the essential aspects that limit their practical application. In this paper, the femtosecond laser technology was applied to process the surface of titanium alloy and then the surface was functionalized by a dual-layers coating to obtain lotus leaf-like superhydrophobic surfaces. Through the treatment of femtosecond laser, periodic microstructures were created on the surface of the titanium alloy. After that, a dual-layers coating was produced and sprayed on the surface, which was used to form nanostructure and low surface energy layer. The superhydrophobic surface shows excellent superhydrophobicity with a higher contact angle of 165° and lower sliding angle of 1.2°. Furthermore, the testing results on adhesion strength, water resistance, heat resistance and aviation kerosene resistance of the dual-layers coating exhibited remarkable mechanical stability and chemical durability. Moreover, ice adhesion on untreated smooth surfaces (US-S), sprayed dual-layers coating surface (SN-S) and combined femtosecond laser with dual-layers coating treated surface (MN-S) were investigated in simulated application environment. The MN-S could effectively minimize the ice adhesion, which can reduce the tensile forces and shear forces by up to 26.09%, 44.12% compared to the sample SN-S and 52.78%, 58.24% than that of the sample US-S. The present study provided a chemical-assisted ultrafast femtosecond laser processing technique that could be applied to large-scale preparation of low ice adhesion superhydrophobic surface, presenting broad application prospects.